WW 986: Liminal AI - RTX Spark, Project Solara, Scout, & Much More!

Welcome back to Windows Weekly—big week on two fronts, with Build buzzing stateside and Computex lighting up Taipei; lots of Copilot, lots of Windows on Arm, and yes, I managed to trigger Copilot by accident again.

Greetings from Copenhagen. I opened with a talk on life after the AI hype and closed with a session on building data centers in space, which is already up on NDC Copenhagen’s channel.

So, what actually landed? Nvidia previewed a GPU‑heavy Windows on Arm platform—think Grace CPU tied to a Blackwell RTX GPU with big unified memory—and Microsoft is adapting Windows so local AI can run on the GPU. Microsoft also teased a Surface Laptop Ultra for the second half of the year; it sounds like a powerhouse and a wallet buster.

If you put that kind of muscle on a desk, you’re planning to run models locally. That’s aimed at engineers, creators, and developers, and it also answers rising token bills by shifting some inferencing off the cloud.

This isn’t thin‑and‑light territory; power draw and thermals look closer to mobile workstations. The goal isn’t volume—this is Nvidia staking mindshare with CUDA while Microsoft pushes the idea of unmetered, private AI you already paid for in hardware.

Over at Build, Windows actually took the stage. There’s a Windows Developer Configuration you can apply with winget that strips noise and preps a box for code, plus Win App CLI is GA with a Windows Developer Skills plugin that scaffolds WinUI 3 apps from the command line. CLI‑first is the new pattern because agents can drive it cleanly.

Microsoft’s adding app actions so AI can call features like “remove background in Paint” directly, an experimental intelligent Terminal that mixes shell and agent prompts, and more WSL goodies—including dozens of Linux CLIs now native on Windows. Agents can also run in locked‑down execution containers so they can’t wander your file system.

I tried generating an animation today and burned through tokens on three services, so yeah, permission prompts are noisy but the costs bite even harder.

On‑device AI got a refresh: Microsoft previewed Aon 1.0 models—Instruct for local chat and Plan for tool‑calling—plus new Windows AI APIs so speech, text intelligence, and video super resolution can run on CPUs or dGPUs, not just NPUs. You can test pieces now in Edge Insider, with Hugging Face support coming soon.

Agents dominated Build. Microsoft is shaping a desktop “autopilot” app to orchestrate agents across cloud and local, and GitHub has a new desktop preview focused on agent workflows. Mustafa Suleyman’s Microsoft AI group rolled out a family of models—image, voice, and a coding model now lighting up in GitHub Copilot—meant to reduce dependence on outside vendors.

The showstopper was Stevie Bathiche’s Project Solara pitch: an agent‑first platform where the OS is a thin, in‑between layer and the UI is generated on the fly for whatever device you’re using—badge, hub, glasses, tablet. It’s Android‑based under the hood, with Qualcomm and MediaTek on silicon and enterprise rails like Intune and Entra for identity.

Classic Microsoft move: be the middleware that connects devices, models, identity, and storage. You’ll still see third parties build the hardware; Microsoft smooths the orchestration and trust story.

Windows polish continues through the Insider rings: Start now supports larger or smaller layouts and a cleaner profile area, while the taskbar finally has a true small‑height option and can live on any edge. Timing feels right for summer so new Arm PCs and gaming handhelds benefit from the latency and resource tweaks.

On hardware, Qualcomm announced the low‑cost Snapdragon C series to chase the entry MacBook vibe; Acer has one coming later this year. Dell answered with a $600 XPS 13 on Intel’s Wildcat, complete with a 40‑TOPS NPU and Wi‑Fi 7. A refreshed Surface Pro with Snapdragon X2 Elite may arrive sooner than expected.

Elsewhere in AI: Anthropic’s valuation surged and it filed to go public. OpenAI’s 5.5 release came off a little overly eager and is being tuned. Desktop apps from OpenAI and Anthropic now offer computer‑use on Windows; powerful, but don’t flip every safety off unless you love chaos and have backups.

Dev corner: Canonical is stewarding Flutter desktop and already ships Flutter apps in Ubuntu. Declarative UI keeps spreading, and Microsoft quietly posted UI Reactor, a React‑style, C# approach for WinUI—promising for devs who prefer composing UI in code, even as WinUI still trails Win32 for some deep features.

Xbox notes: the showcase drew flak for flashing PlayStation logos, but cross‑platform is the business now—no apologies needed. Fable shifted to spring to avoid getting steamrolled by GTA 6, and Game Pass picked up new drops including fresh Astroneer content.

Astroneer’s great fun—starts as survival and factory building, then you’re drilling through planets and detonating mountains. It scratches that Factorio itch with a playful vibe.

Quick hits to start: Xbox Insider alpha is testing small quality-of-life tweaks like a more accurate controller preview, full hex color picks, and a clean what’s-new card after reboots. Neat, not earthshaking.

ASUS has a new ROG Ally model with an OLED screen at a high refresh rate and a thermal redesign, plus swappable D-pad parts, beefy memory and storage, and built-in upscaling. The bundle pairs with Xreal glasses for a huge virtual display, with timing likely around the holidays and no price yet.

Intel rolled out handheld-focused chips under the Arc G3 banner tuned for this form factor, with super resolution and low-latency features. Devices based on them could arrive as early as this month.

The next Call of Duty is another Modern Warfare entry, aiming for a tighter, weighty feel instead of the bloated launcher mess. It looks great, lands in October, and hits PC, Xbox, PlayStation 5, and even Switch.

Before we stack the back-of-the-book, a quick note: Club TWiT keeps this independent network going. Your ten a month gets ad-free shows, a surprisingly great Discord, and live specials like WWDC coverage behind a private link because of takedown shenanigans; thanks to everyone who’s already in.

Tip of the week: it’s the year of the CLI. There’s a Microsoft Build CLI repo, Store and WinApp CLIs, and the new Windows Developer Skills setup that lets an AI agent scaffold modern WinUI 3 apps straight from the command line.

I tried it end to end: installed the prerequisites, let the agent run for roughly three quarters of an hour, and it produced a Notepad-like WinUI 3 app that compiled cleanly on Arm and x64. The UI needed tweaks, but the flow worked, and it can use OpenAI, Claude, or others—CLI now, a friendly front end later.

Wild moment: it recreated a find-and-replace pane design I’d invented years ago, likely learned from my public repo. It’s a reminder that open code becomes training fuel—and that agentic coding has moved from novelty to solidly useful.

App picks: Typora and IA Writer are excellent cross‑platform markdown editors. IA Writer now sells direct outside app stores with simple email-based activation, which I love.

RunAs Radio pick: Data API Builder. It gives DBAs an abstraction layer, exposing a database as REST, GraphQL, or an agent-friendly endpoint with governance and monitoring so devs stay flexible without wrecking performance.

That chat with Jerry Nixon is RunAs Radio episode 1039 at runasradio.com.

Whiskey: Longmorn. It’s a Speyside distillery from the late nineteenth century, long tied to blends like Chivas, with a history that runs through John Duff, the Paterson crash, Seagram, and Pernod Ricard—so the single malts are less known but prized by indie bottlers.

I tasted an advance sample of Hunter Laing’s Old Malt Cask Longmorn twenty-year single cask—silky, caramel, classic Speyside. Expect a tiny run, a price around two hundred pounds if you can even spot one, and check boutique shops or indie lists; next week I’ll bring a Danish bottle.

We wrapped under an hour—thank you. Stick around for Intelligent Machines with Robert Tercek on AI, and catch Windows Weekly live on Wednesdays at 11 a.m. Pacific or on demand; whiskey clips live in that wonderfully odd playlist link, and yes, the show’s very much alive and kicking.